3.5 ebXML Collaboration Protocol Profile and ebXML Collaboration Protocol Agreement

The Collaboration Protocol Profile describes/defines the capabilities of a company. This are the Business Processes and the technical details such as transportation (e.g. HTTP, HTTP over SSL, FTP), messaging (e.g. SOAP) and security constraints (e.g. digital signature, certificates).

The Collaboration Protocol Agreement defines the interactions between two parties. The CPA is derived from two or more CPP's. The Collaboration Protocol Profile and Agreement Specification document [9] defines what a CPP and a CPA are composed of, the details of the CPP and CPA. The CPA is like the contract between two parties to conduct electronic business in that defined way.

Again the CPP can reference several Process Specifications (Business Processes or Business Collaborations).

A good question is how to get a CPA from two CPP's. ebXML proposes possible ways and it may not be fully automated yet. A future goal of the ebXML standard is to get a CPA generated automatically. ebXML proposes to calculate the intersection of two CPP's.

Figure 10: Collaboration-Protocol Profile and Agreement Specification (Adapted from the Collaboration Protocol Profile and Agreement Specification document)

Figure 10 shows a typical scenario. Typically two companies first describe their business capabilities in the form of Business Collaborations. Then they create CPP's by adding information about the company (name, contact etc) and technical information like the desired transport protocol, transport security protocol, and messaging protocol. A CPP only references Business Collaborations stored in the ebXML repository. Then both companies submit their CPP's to the ebXML registry which stores the CPP's in the repository (number 1). A company might then query the ebXML registry to get a suitable CPP from a potential trading partner. The company then calculates the intersection of the retrieved CPP with its own CPP which results in a CPA (number 2). The company sends the calculated CPA to the potential trading partner (number 3) and if the potential trading partner is happy with it he/she accepts the new CPA (number 4). The CPA can be registered at the ebXML registry. In the next step both companies configure their Business Service Interface (BSI) software with the newly created CPA (number 5). After the configuration the BSI software is able to conduct electronic business (number 6). The BSI software knows which documents are needed, the choreography of the documents, the transportation protocol, the structure of the individual documents, the role in a business transaction. The CPA defines the conversation between the two trading partners.

What the BSI software does not know is the content of the documents. This is very central and not part of the ebXML standard. Software vendors will provide software to connect BSI software to the back-end software systems.